SeaWaves Blog

As the winter winds to a close and spring approaches, at SeaWaves we can’t help but get excited. Our hometown, Sea Isle City, is a summer vacation beach town. While it quiets down in the winter, the summer brings lots of excitement… and that’s the real reason we’re located here.

In the summer, Sea Isle City is bustling with vacationers who come down for the week (or the weekend) to enjoy some fun in the sun. Visitors stroll along the promenade, jump waves in the ocean, read books on the beach, go kayaking and some even try their hand at wind surfing. It all adds to the great summer atmosphere that is Sea Isle City.

One of our favorite parts of the summer are the several ice cream parlours around town. After a long day in the sun, we like going out to eat at one of the sea food restaurants like Mike’s Seafood, and then afterward heading out to get ice cream. Later at night, there’s nothing like hanging out at the Springfield Inn Carousel (an outside bar).

Recently, there has been talk about the possibility of building a new section of Sea Isle City to draw in more tourists. Rumors are that this will include amusement rides and maybe even a water park. While we don’t look forward to the spike in traffic that this will bring, it will certainly help the economy grow by leaps and bounds and give visitors even more options when they visit.

We can’t emphasize enough how great a Sea Isle City vacation is. If you plan to visit, here’s a really useful page that helps you search through Sea Isle City rentals to find the perfect place to stay.

One of our new clients is called Paper Proofreader. While we work on developing their e-commerce website, we decided to put up a page describing the services they will provide with editing and proofreading papers.

Why did we do this? Mainly to prime the pump. To start the aging process on the domain. Any new domain needs to age a bit before it is taken seriously. Given that it will take us a few months to develop this site, we hope that once we are ready we can hit the ground running.

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There are almost 3 times as many cell phones in the world then computers. So it’s no surprise that Google sees mobile search as it’s major opportunity for revenue growth. Since Google makes most of its money by selling search based advertising, all they need to do is increase the number of people that search.

The interesting thing about cell phone search is that it’s often used for different reasons than normal search. For example, someone might with a cell phone is more likely to be searching for information relevant to being on the road in some particular place. Thus, their searches are more likely to be seeking local information.

At SeaWaves, we are aggressively trying to identify ways that we can get involved in local mobile search, and our plans are to utilize our Jersey Shore website site as testing ground.

Well, when we acquired The Dog Guide it wasn’t clear what was in store. But several years later we are about to move the site out of development and into BETA status.

What does that mean? Well, you can expect that as soon as we roll into 2009, the site will have the following in place:

• A popular blog with funny dog pictures and news that is uploaded daily.
• A section on dog health with a nice collection of articles.
• A section on dog training with a fleshed out series called Canine Manners 101
• A collection of photo galleries of many popular dog breeds with many still to come.
• Information and pictures for over 200 dog breeds

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My friend Chris Garrett recently did something with WordPress that still amazes me. He took a basic installation of WordPress, had a plugin built, and effectively created a shopping site where the user is able to choose the options they want in a credit card.

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A wide-net resource article is a single article that targets the long tail of a popular search term. The wide-net resource article does not attempt to compete directly at the level of the popular search term, but rather it uses the popular search term as the foundation for multiple qualified phrases built from the popular search term.

Let me explain by using an example. Over at College Crunch, we have built a wide-net resource around the phrase “starting salary” - but we are not really interested in that specific phrase. Rather, we are interested in phrases like “starting salary for engineers” or “average starting salary for biochemists”

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Those of us who work in the web industry know that it can be frustrating to move really big files around the web. Most email hosts place really low limits on the size of an email file that you can send.

While YouTube has certainly made it easier to share videos, it also has limitations (not the least of which is that it only handles movies).

Today, I was looking around the web to find the best ways to send large files to other people without requiring that both ends download and install a certain software. Web based systems (or as the technically savvy call it - The Cloud) tend to be the simplest, most effective ways to handle file sharing. While searching I came across this list of 13 different services to move big files around the web.

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I spend most of my days promoting content in social media like Digg and Reddit. That’s because they are very controlled environments, and getting noticed on those sites is fairly straightfoward and scientific.

However, I’d trade social media for Big Media any day. For example, yesterday one of our sites got onto Digg’s front page and got mentioned in a Fox news article. Two different articles. In my view the one that got on Digg’s front page was much better and more interesting.

But, the article that got on Fox News ended up sending more traffic.

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One of my favorite blogs that we run here at SeaWaves is called One Big Health Nut. From the summer of 2007 to the summer of 2008 it was updated daily with really interesting health facts.

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A SeaWaves website called The Common Sense Investor has been sitting idle for well over 2 years.

The site does not get very much traffic at this point. However, we are in the process of resuscitating it with the hopes of getting traffic up below the 100k Alexa range.

What are our challenges?

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